


Ever Darker

by bitboozy



Category: Broadchurch
Genre: Alternate Ending - Season One, Drama, F/M, Family, Gen, Latimer Case
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:42:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27295858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bitboozy/pseuds/bitboozy
Summary: The day before Joe is arrested for the murder of Danny Latimer, Ellie receives some startling news.
Relationships: Alec Hardy & Ellie Miller, Alec Hardy/Ellie Miller
Comments: 46
Kudos: 59





	Ever Darker

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all -  
> This takes place in and around scenes in season one, episodes seven and eight. An alternate take on the end of season one.

“Don’t tell me what my limits are.”

Even as Ellie hones in on him, even as she is gritting her teeth and seething, standing there in the hallway, she finds herself nauseous. There’s a thin, creeping fog rising from the pit of her stomach.

“Then don’t tell me to go home.”

She places her hands on her hips and tries to focus. The look in his eyes, his stupid bloody face.

Like an abandoned puppy dog who somehow crawled his way into a business suit.

She acquiesces and as they walk through the door into CID she feels the wave of nausea return. Their colleagues watch him retreat into his office without a word and close the door. She avoids their collective gaze shiftily. Then she bolts into the ladies’ room.

After about five minutes on the floor hugging porcelain, she hoists herself back up and out of the stall. She looks a bit green when she regards herself in the mirror. Leaning over the sink, she can’t even remember the last thing she ate. One or two grapes from the bag she’d thrown on Hardy’s hospital bed. How had she managed to vomit _nothing_ for five straight minutes?

She blinks at the mirror and takes a deep breath. And then, with great trepidation, she reaches for her breasts, grabbing them one in each hand. She winces. Then groans.

That’s when Dawn, a PC, walks in.

“…All right, Ellie?”

She drops her hands back down to her sides. “Yeah,” she replies with a definitive nod, then brushes past her out the door again.

*

Hardy sends her in to interview Susan Wright. She keeps a glass of water close, her fingers clinging to the cool glass. She’s feeling a bit faint and oh god she and Hardy can’t _both_ go down. As the interview goes on, as Susan Wright gets more and more on her tits, she grips the glass tighter and tighter until she fears it might shatter.

Susan’s personal history, her tragic story, only fuels Ellie’s nausea. There are tears in her eyes, she knows there are, and she’s afraid if she blinks they’ll come tumbling out. She’s also afraid that if she breathes at all, she’ll need a paper bag to be sick into.

But somehow she makes it out of the room without doing either.

While Hardy meets with that bloody self-professed medium by the beach, she goes straight to the chemist to procure a home pregnancy test.

Then back to Susan Wright.

*

When she meets Hardy by the seawall, she can barely see straight. Her brain is swimming in her skull. She is desperately trying to focus on the case, on every tiny little detail that’s swirling through her head. But all the time she’s thinking about the boxed home test in her bag, weighing her down like a sodding bowling ball. She stares at him, frowns at him, burning a hole into him in an effort just to _listen_ to him.

She’s on birth control. She takes a pill every day. Well, most days. She’s been a bit scattered the last couple months, she’s maybe missed a day here or there.

She and Joe certainly aren’t shagging _often_ at the moment. She’s at work until all hours. He’s up early with the baby. But, once a week maybe. About once a week they manage it.

She asks Hardy if he’s feeling okay. She’s asking herself all the same. _Spectacular_ , he says. She nearly turns and vomits into the sea.

*

Back to Susan Wright. Christ, this bloody woman. She’d much rather work Nige over. It’s a bit sexist, she thinks. Hardy with Nige, her with Susan.

“I can’t just let it happen,” Susan says. “Not again.”

Ellie throws back a glass of water to quell her rising nausea.

*

She hopes to sneak off to the loo and pee on a stick once she’s through in the interview room, but Hardy’s finished with Nige at the same time. Another row. More yelling in the hallway. Their colleagues have stopped even looking up at this point.

“God’s sake.” Hardy leans against the wall of his office. He really does look like shit, Brian was right. “As if workin’ with you wasn’t annoyin’ enough, what are they playin’ at?”

She wants to throttle him sometimes. Most of the time.

He shouts about how they’re running out of time and then disappears without a word following a mysterious phone call. What a shitface.

*

It’s midnight before she has a chance take the test. Hardy is locked in his office.

As she waits for the line to appears on the stick, she leans against the wall next to the sink and folds her arms across her chest. She breathes in and out several times before uncrossing her arms and breathing a little easier.

She braces herself to look at the results but then his booming voice startles her.

“Miller!” He’s shouting her name all over the floor until finally there’s a knock on the loo door. “Miller, you in there?”

“God’s sake!” She shouts back. “Can I not have _five minutes_ on my own?”

It’s possible he’s heard the quivering in her voice because he backs off. “I’ll be in my office.”

Her hands are shaking when she reaches for the stick. _Please be negative please be negative please be negative._

She’s hyper aware of her breasts aching and she knows the results in her gut half a second before she sees it with her eyes.

 _Positive_.

The wave of nausea returns, this time likely brought on by sheer dread and horror, and she runs into the stall to be sick again.

*

 **Coming home?** Joe texts her around 12:30 in the morning. She’s sitting at her desk staring absently at her computer screen.

Too quickly, she fires back a response: **Don’t wait up.** But then quickly adds: **Xx**

He doesn’t respond.

Later, Hardy’s on about Danny’s mobile phone again. If she doesn’t sleep soon, she’s going to pass out just as he did the night before, and _then_ where will they be.

“Is this something for the morning?”

After promising to turn over Tom’s laptop, he finally releases her. She can't get out into the fresh night air soon enough.

*

With her car parked in the drive, she sits behind the steering wheel for ten minutes at least.

Pregnant.

Who knows how far along.

She hasn’t had her period in…well, ages. She’d been nursing Fred until they went to Florida – a terrible time to wean him but she’d planned to be promoted upon their return so it seemed the pragmatic thing to do. And then with the stress of the case…

What she’d _assumed_ had been the stress of the case.

Perhaps she’d gotten pregnant in Florida.

It would make sense. She and Joe had made love more in Florida than they had in quite a while, what with work and the baby. Nearly every night in fact.

Christ, has she been pregnant all this time? With the extraordinary stress her body has been under it’s a wonder she’s not miscarried. When she thinks of the unbelievable lack of sleep and total malnutrition…

She bangs her head on the steering wheel.

Ten years without a baby and then, bam, two babies in two years? God’s sake, she’s thirty-eight years old.

This was not the plan. But then, things _never_ go to plan for her, do they?

*

Joe’s asleep, thank god, when she tiptoes into their bedroom. She’s too tired to shower. She changes into her pyjamas then goes rummaging for Tom’s laptop. Best she get a hold of it now than to have to wrestle him for it in the morning. But it’s nowhere to be found.

Bollocks. Aaaand she’s woken Joe.

“El. It’s half two in the morning.”

He sees the look on her face and sends her to bed while he promises to look for it in her place. She waits in bed, duvet bunched up in her lap, gazing around at the half-painted walls of their bedroom.

They don’t have time for another baby. They don’t have _room_ for another baby. They don’t have the bloody patience for another baby. Truly another baby could kill them. She hardly sees Fred as it is.

Joe comes back into their bedroom empty-handed. He’s looked everywhere, he says.

She snaps at him. She doesn’t know why.

When she finally switches off her bedside lamp, she realizes it’s because she doesn’t want to tell him yet. Something is holding her back.

*

Joe’s up before her the next morning. She can feel him shuffling around underneath the sheets. But there’s no sound from the monitor, which means Fred hasn’t woken. She opens one eye, preparing to shield them from the light, when she feels Joe’s arm slip around her waist. Then his lips are on her neck. She frowns, knowing he can’t see it, and groans a bit.

“You’re up early.”

She tries her hardest not to make it sound like a complaint. It’s not that she doesn’t _want_ to, it’s just that she’s had three hours’ sleep if she’s lucky and it’s likely a matter of minutes before she has to run off to the loo to vomit. She’s _always_ had rough periods of morning sickness. With Tom, with Fred, even with the child they’d lost at twelve weeks when Tom was three. It’s the one thing she can count on.

“ _Up_ early, yes,” he murmurs into her neck.

She chuckles quietly even though he’s made that joke many times before. In fact she should have anticipated it when she asked the question.

“I’m empty, love, I’ve got nothing,” she tells him, albeit with sympathy in her voice. “My body feels like a ton of bricks.”

This doesn’t stop him from pressing up against her. He is, indeed, _up early_. She sighs. Frankly, Joe has never been one for morning sex. Now and then, probably after a spicy dream, but generally he is cranky in the morning. He must be procrastinating something, she realizes. Or trying to distract himself. Fair enough, of course, at the moment. Things are so dark and seem to be growing ever darker.

“Been almost two weeks, El.”

She raises her head a bit though she still can’t look right at him. “I’m solving our son’s best friend’s _murder_ , been a bit busy you know.”

“ _Are_ you?” His ministrations have stopped, he’s propped himself up trying to look at her. “ _Solving_ it? It’s been months.”

In that moment she’s so angry she fears she could rip her pillow apart, watch the down feathers disperse in the air. But that’s when the nausea hits. With a hand to her mouth, she throws off the duvet and darts out of bed, disappearing into the loo.

*

After two hours at work (roughly twenty minutes of that time spent in the loo), Ellie meets Joe and the boys outside the station. Joe is to take Tom in for questioning while Ellie looks after Fred.

Joe hands off Fred’s buggy to her. She kisses the top of Tom’s head, squeezes his arm, and tells him not to worry. “Just tell the truth, lovely,” she says. “You’ve nothing to worry about.”

She takes Fred to the park. It’s possible she’s _never_ taken Fred to the park, just the two of them. When she lifts him out of his buggy, he wraps his little legs tightly around her and refuses to be put down.

“I know, my little love.” She kisses his face all over as he clings to her. “I know.”

He’d learned to say _Mummy_ just before they left for Florida. She’d positively _reveled_ in hearing it while they were on holiday. In the couple months since they’ve been back, all she’s gotten to hear is _Hi, Mummy_ and _Bye, Mummy_.

With Fred on her hip, she strolls around the playground, pointing things out to him. Some words he repeats, some he doesn’t. She tries not to be too distracted by the idea of what a little brother or sister so soon would do to Fred, still a baby himself. He hasn’t had nearly enough time with her. He’ll be Joe’s forever.

Fred begins to doze in her arms, his head on her shoulder, and she decides to walk him back home rather than waiting for Joe to fetch him from her at the park.

He cries when she tries to lay him down in his crib so she rocks him a good while more. Then finally he’s down. She goes to the kitchen and sends Joe a text to meet her here when he and Tom are through.

She putters around a bit aimlessly in the kitchen. There’s plenty of tidying up to do from the morning’s breakfast and, in truth, from last night’s supper. But she finds herself pacing instead.

She sends a text to Hardy: **That’s enough now. You’ve been at it long enough.**

He doesn’t reply, of course, and neither does Joe. He simply shows up at the house roughly fifteen minutes later.

Ellie is leaning against the counter with a mug of tea in both hands. She looks up, wide-eyed, when he enters.

“How was it then?” She asks, placing her mug down. “Tom’s back at school?”

“Yeah, dropped him back,” Joe replies, switching the electric kettle back on.

Ellie hands him a mug from the dish rack.

“Your boss is cold as ruddy _ice_ , El,” he tells her. “Not one ounce an empathy in him. Should’ve seen the way he questioned Tom. Christ's sake, he's just a boy.”

Ellie is frowning. Hardy drives her potty more often than not but she wouldn’t go _that_ far. “What d’you mean?”

“He’s got it in his head Tom’s to blame, I don’t know how.”

She nearly _laughs_ , though the notion is utterly terrifying. “He hasn’t, I know he hasn’t. He’s just following a lead. One thing brings us to another.”

“I know what a lead is, El.”

“Don’t get snippy with _me_.” She has her hands on her hips now, somewhere between offense and defense, it’s impossible to say.

“I’m _telling_ you, he has it in for him.”

“He does _not_ have it in for my _eleven-year-old son_ ,” Ellie retorts.

“Oh, you’re defending _Hardy_ now? That’s new.” Joe pours boiling water into his mug. He gestures at hers. She holds it out and he refills it.

“How is _Tom_?” She asks. “Is he all right?”

“Bit shaken up I’d think,” he replies. “Had half a mind to take him back with me, let him be truant for the day, but he’s got a maths exam.” He blows on his steaming hot tea then looks across the mug at her. “Don’t you need to be getting back?”

She nods, setting her mug on the counter. “Yeah, but I, um. Good we have this moment to ourselves because, well.” She breathes out, then stares at her shoes a moment before looking up again. “Need to speak to you about something.”

She could swear she sees _terror_ in his eyes. It sends a chill down her spine.

She waits until his gaze meets hers steadily before she says it, voice trembling.

“I’m pregnant.”

*


End file.
